Show OCR
iYIlfl.* ixai » itv --------- —Broadhurst Currie^to appear as Florence in “ A Fool and His Money ” next season.FERNiToR BRONX PARK.Prof. Underwood Has Gathered Specimens of Many Varieties In Jamaica For the Botanical Gardens.Professor L. M. Underwood of Columbia University recently completed a four months’ tour of Investigation in Jamaica, and is now in Europe, where he expects to spend some five months in completing an exhaustive study of ferns, a task which was the main object of his researches in Jamaica.He began the work in January and included a hurried trip to Cuba in his travels. His collections will add at least 3,000 numbers, which include some 400 species of ferns, to the herbarium in the New York Botanical Garden in Bronx Park. They represent about half the list of herbarium pecimens secured, the other half consisting largely of hepatics and mosses, but including some 200 lichens, a few algae, a hundred or so of fungi and about as many flowering plants.Seven large cases of living plants, the specimens being about evenly divided between orchids and ferns, have been sent. It is expected that these will develop some varieties of the respective plants which will prove new to science.Prof. Underwood has made an interesting report of his experiences in Jamaica. He says the ferns of Jamaica, of which there are about 500 specimens, range in size from the lofty tree ferns, which attain a height of fifty feel and rival the palms in their beauty, down to tiny varieties which cover a space no larger than one’s thumb nail. There are places where not only every available inch of soil is carpeted with them, but they cover the trees, rolt; and branch, 'cling to the rough tree trunks and even to the tree ferns themeslves. Another variety forms a vine that clambers un the trees or anything else it can find to cling to, to a height of twenty feet or more.Probably the most beautiful variety are known as the filmy ferns. Nature has deprived them of the outer layer of tissue, and they are almost transparent, so that the delicate veining and the still more delicate tracery of the cell walls in plainly visible. This beautiful species is largely if not completely represented in the collections secured by Dr. Underwood.The luxuriance of tropical vegetation in Jamaica was , illustrated by ferns which had overgrown an abandoned plantation which Dr. Underwood visited. Every path was made impassable by the plants until the two negro guides had matted them down for the others of the party. One threw himself on the mass and rolled it down by the weight of his body. His companion followed treading and stamping the plants still more compactly. The explorer! found themselves at times upheld four feet above the ground by the matted plants.
Your clip comment has been saved and pending for approval before it displayed.